Wednesday May 7 in Wroc?aw, Poland

Running up to the Libre Graphics meeting 2008, OSP invites designers, programmers and typographers to work on a collaborative design project. Inspired by modular systems for road sign lettering, and a long interest in fonts designed by engineers, we would like to work with you on an impossible project: to design a whole alphabet in a day.

How do you ‘make things’ across styles, tastes and traditions? Does it always mean to average differences or a sampling of parts? How do you design through translation? What will be lost and what could be gained?

Depending on the needs and interests of the participants, we form small working groups that are each joined by one or more OSP members. For inspiration or as actual source material, we will photograph as many characters as possible on our roadtrip from Brussels to Wroclaw. Each of the groups adopts a few letters to experiment with, using free software tools (Gimp, Inkscape, Fontforge + some Spiro flavor…) to draw, digitize and transform. At the end of the day we will gather all glyphs into one font and festively release the collection under an Open Font License.

With

• Pierre Huyghebaert (BEL): typographer, designer
• Harrisson (FRA/BEL): typographer, designer
• Yi Liang (CHN/BEL): designer, illustrator
• Femke Snelting (NED/BEL): artist, designer
• Ivan Monroy Lopez (MEX/NED): programmer, artist
• Ludivine Loiseau (FRA/BEL): typographer
• Nicolas Malevé (BEL): programmer, data activist
• Ricardo Lafuente (POR/NED): designer, programmer

Plus the help of: Dave Crossland, Alexandre Prokoudine and Nicolas Spalinger.

For who
This workshop is for anyone interested in the combination of design, free software and typography. Computer skills come in handy but if you are courageous and interested: everything is possible!

Working language: English, with multi-lingual plugins installed

Practical
There is a limited amount of computers available in OPT, but if you have a laptop with Linux installed, please bring it!
Entrance: free

Wednesday May 7 11:00 – 18:00
O?rodek Postaw Twórczych (Creative Art Center)
ul. Dzia?kowa 15, 50-538
Wroc?aw, Poland
http://www.opt-art.net/